about this site
I started this website in November, 1995, in an effort to create an online medical journal club on the World Wide Web, then in its infancy. I periodically posted a detailed summary of an article from the medical literature; readers could submit comments about these articles, which were edited and posted.

Over the next five years, some seventy summaries were posted, along with many comments from readers and occasional contributions by authors of the original articles. After five years of actively maintaining the site, I did not update it significantly between July, 2000 and August, 2003. Despite this, the number of visitors remained fairly constant.

The persistent visitor interest in the site gave me the impetus to revive Journal Club, in a more interactive and automated form. In late 2003 I redesigned the site from scratch, making it database-driven and automated, essentially a programming exercise in dynamic, database driven website design (using PHP and MySql). However, everything I wanted to accomplish with this redesign and much more already exists in the Weblog system. Thus, as of October 2004 I redesigned Journal Club as a Weblog, or blog.

website policies
JournalClub is a non-commercial undertaking, not affiliated with any organization.

privacy

JournalClub respects your privacy. In order to post comments, you must submit your email address.

Your email address will not be posted along with comments that you submit, unless you specify it in text of your comment, and will not be made available to third parties.

Your email address may be used to advise you of significant changes to the policies or features of this website.

content

I envision this website as a discussion forum about articles in the medical literature, but also about the medical literature per se. It is not intended as a discussion forum for individual medical questions and problems. It is also not meant as a general medical reference, and should not be used as a substitute for professional medical care.

Comments will be read and edited prior to posting. However, the accuracy and suitability of comments is the responsibility of those submitting them; inclusion here in no way implies approval by this website, which is not responsible for them.

As maintainer of this website, I reserve the right to remove any comments which I feel are inappropriate in any way. Any complaints about comments that have been posted should be submitted to webmaster@journalclub.org.

copyright

This website operates under a Creative Commons "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike" copyright license. In particular, permission is granted to reproduce the contents of Journal Club, as long as this is for not-for-profit purposes and as long as the source is accurately credited. Prior notification is requested.

Users who submit comments agree to the above conditions. In particular they grant this website permission to publish their comments and to pass this permission on, according to the Creative Commons agreement. Apart from the above consideration, users retain the rights to their own comments, and can publish them elsewhere without restriction.

content ownership and $ on the medical internet

"Content" ownership and financing are challenged by the Internet. In the July 1995 issue of Wired magazine, information expert Esther Dyson predicted that most content on the Web would be provided for free. Under this scenario, content functions primarily as a vehicle for advertising or as a come-on to more marketable services. Others, quoted in the same article, saw a future for information "metering", where you pay-as-you-download for the data you want. (Click here for Esther Dyson's views on this question, which are just as fresh today as they were in 1995).